August 13, 2026 • 33 mins
Thomas Jefferson wasn't just obsessed with mastodons for no reason. Instead, he was in an intense dispute with a French naturalist named Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Leclerc argued that the American continent was 'degenerate', and all animals and life forms in the joint were weaker, smaller, and less-developed than those in Europe. In the second part of this special two-part series, returning guest Lauren Vogelbaum regales the gang with the final chapter of Jefferson's strange beef with Leclerc... and how this conflict eventually led to the concept of biological extinction.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. That's our super producer, mister Max Williams,
Noel Brown, Ben Bollen. This is part two of a
crazy exploration of Thomas Jefferson, who gets a nickname in
this series, and Mastertons and.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
A real history mystery.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, big, big teeth. We couldn't do it without our
special guest, returning guest friend of the show, dear friend
of ours, Lauren Vogel bam.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Oh, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Jeez, guys, can we just jump into the show already
in progress?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Buffone knows that that Tommy is beefing with him about
this whole thing a little bit, and he invites him
over to dinner in Paris because both of them are
hanging out in Paris at the time, and everyone thinks
that this is going to be you know, I don't know,
like like maybe maybe they're going to make peace, maybe
they're going to fight it out once and for all.
Neither of those things happen, partially because over dinner, someone
(01:34):
mentions the existence of Moose and Buffoone confidently says that
no such thing could possibly exist, that it has to
be a tall tale of like a reindeer or something,
and Jefferson later recalled he wrote down that he said this.
(01:55):
He was like, the reindeer could walk under the belly
of our.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Moose, turning into such a dick swinging context, a real
peepee contest, it really is.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
He's like, as men say, he's like.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I'm a I'm a big deal. And you know what,
to be honest, folks, for anybody who has not seeing
a moose in person, no matter how many photos you
look at, they are bigger than you think.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
They are beefy legs, yeah exactly. I mean they are
long legs, like almost camel esque length legs, and you could, like,
you know, totally maybe drive a very small clown car
underneath them.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Oh yeah probably.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Not, probably not a reindeer.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But yeah, maybe it's like a baby reindeer.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
But sure.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
But they're they're they're gangly, they're huge. They actually even
now ruin Halloween throughout parts of Alaska because they love
eating jack lanterns and no one can stop them. That
is true, you know.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Good for them, Halloween power, big Halloween. So Jefferson is like, no, no, no, no, no, no,
we can prove, we can prove a moose to you.
He gets on the line with with another buddy, the
governor of New Hampshire. He's like, hey, I know you
guys got moose. Send send me a moose. I need
(03:14):
a moose now, stat It was like a dead one. Well,
I mean, you can't send someone a live moose. That's insane.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
You could, you know, you could pack it up in
some sort of caravan. Perhaps did he put it in
the guy's bed like Godfather style? Like what are we talking?
It seems a little threaten'd towards.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
It's I think he was really trying to He was
being as polite about sending a dude a dead moose.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
He got ahead of us, I did.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
He certainly did not. Yeah, because he sent this. He
sent the pone a moose to his house in Paris.
It was an ex moose. It was. This was not
living moose. It was so much worse for the travel,
like most of the fur had rubbed off. It was
wearing a different set of antlers because the original antlers
had gotten lost along the way.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Like what like this is Buffalo bill type stuff, man,
this is gnarly smell grat I'm.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Sure it did not, because it was not stuffed before
it got sent overseas. This was a moose corpse. This
was the corpse of a moose, and it had right
like like like you know, like in The Grinch. It
had like a little different antlers stapled to his head.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah, like they actually sent three different pairs, so like
Jefferson could just mix and match however he wanted.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Oh wow, Well, his thinking was probably that if he
taxidermied it, that that bouffant would claim shenanigans.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
That's not that's not bad, sort of like the Beast
of Gadon in Brotherhood of the Wolf.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
But okay, so we also we know this had to
happen the governor of New Hampshire. Here's this bizarrely specific request.
It probably reaches out to Tommy's buddies and they're like, look, man,
it'll just be easier if you say yes.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
This is also the kind of thing you could probably
only do if you you were a guy like Thomas Jeffers.
Don't know that they would allow you to send a
moose through the post otherwise. Yeah, again, not clear exactly,
I'm sure he didn't use the post, but you get them,
you get the meaning, you get.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
My yeah yeah, fun aside. Uh, it's not clear whether
Buffone ever actually personally received this moose.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
It went to a poor assistant, to some sort of
some underling who opened that one before.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Was like getting on in his ears. He wasn't really
doing I think he was out of Paris at the
time when the thing arrived. Jefferson did apologize for the
state of the moose and his like note when he
when he left it with this poor assistant, and insisted
later that Buffon had received it and was very impressed
and was going to issue a correction but just happened
(05:46):
to die before he got around to it.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
There we go, There we go. Unfortunate Lord, how accurate
do we think Tommy's claim is here?
Speaker 3 (05:57):
One on one to ten? That's uh no, okay, that's
living with the under fence.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Okay, there we go. Okay, So at best we could
say that maybe Thomas Jefferson believed that to be the case.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah, snope, says probably not unlikely.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah yeah, underpants, underfants, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah, all right, but okay, so yeah, so moose aside aside, Uh,
Thomas Jefferson did wind up winning this one. There was
all of his evidence, partially about weasel taints, that got
published in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia in
(06:43):
seventeen eighty five. So with mounting evidence against Pafollone's theory,
it fell apart, like the corpse of a moose arriving
in Paris a year after its untimely and a continent away.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Loves to it's very well done.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yeah, that's my sweaty ball's voice. That's a shadows.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
So this sounds like it might be the end of
the tail. But asute ridiculous historians, you'll realize that we
planted a few scenes, right, We sewed a few threads
here that we have to get to because, as you
find in your research, you're Lauren H. Thomas, Jefferson is
not the only person excited, right, He's not the only
(07:30):
polymath or learned, learned character who gets an obsession with
these bones.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Can I just say it's it's it's It may be
the end of the tail, but it's just the beginning
of the taint.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
There we go, There we go.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
I need a T shirt with that one. Yeah, No,
certainly not, because because the excitement about these fossils was
was still brewing outside of this one extremely specific grudge match. So, okay,
if y'all are unfamiliar with a fellow by the name
(08:04):
of Charles Wilson Peel was Charlie. Yeah, yeah, Chuck yeah.
He was this artist and another polymathia who famously had
painted portraits of like a lot of the figures of
the American Revolution. He later opened one of the first
museums in the United States in Philadelphia, and by early
(08:24):
eighteen oh one his museum was housed in the same
building as the American Philosophical Society, which was then helmed
by Thomas Jefferson. So they were like keen on these
fossil digs, and when they got word of this spectacular
find in the Hudson River Valley in eighteen oh one,
(08:45):
they funded Peel to put together this complex excavation, and
he wound up bringing back two partial master don skeletons,
and him and his team set to work compiling a
single standing model for them. The team, by the way,
included one Moses Williams, an enslaved man who was himself
a talented artist and the first known black museum professional
(09:08):
in the country, but so with their work. By on
Christmas Eve of that year, they opened this display of
a near complete fossil model of what they called at
the time of Mammoth. It was the second ever fossil
skeleton to be assembled in the world, and it was
a spulash. It was really impressive. Like they used basically
(09:31):
like for missing bones, they used bilateral symmetry and best
guesses from extant animals to carve replacements from wood. That's
basically what we still do today. The model was eleven
feet tall.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
It was cool.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
They did still have the tusks turned around the wrong
way because they still thought this thing was a carnivore.
But you know, like no one had ever seen anything
like this before, and people felt a sense of like
nationalistic pride about this huge American beast.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Only in America. Baby.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Question for the class, did they have a trunk?
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Oh no, no, no, no, it was it was just
the it was just the fossil model, So they didn't
they didn't have they fled it out, They didn't build
out any flush on it or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
So can we just do a quick reminder that I
believe it was Bouffa who had made the assertion that
no such creature could ever possibly flourish in the swampy
uh you know, garbage, United States. They really did become
a point of pride. We can make big, big boys too.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
And so, of course, with all of this like mounting excitement,
uh you know, when Jefferson got elected president and made
the Louisiana purchase and sent Lewis and Clark out to
survey this newly acquired land. A couple of years later
in eighteen oh three, he was like, yo, Lewis and Clark,
make sure you're on the lookout for living mammoths.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Because nothing ever dies permanently.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Because they still did not believe in extinction.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
So I'm curious about like where this sort of it
seems like it's almost a philosophical divide, Like surely there
were people suggesting that this was possible, not entirely, no, really.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Okay, like like like even to naturalists who were the
most keyed in to all of this kind of stuff.
Like the basic idea from what I understand about it
is that that was floating around at the time is
that assuming that the Earth is a divine and perfect creation,
if that is true, then no part of it can
(11:31):
ever truly perish.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Okay, So still following from from from scripture, like God
has great ideas, and so if God ever went back
on one of those ideas, like a flood or something,
we would know about it from our book.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Which is fascinating considering that war and famine and you know,
horrific things were happening all over the place, and somehow
that doesn't fly in the world.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
But that's humanity's well fair, humanity is pross realiser.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
One natural problem.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Is there heretical? It is to say that the for instance,
the cow was created and now and the cow was
created by divinity, and therefore the cow is as perfect
as a cow can be, So why would it be
gone from the world? Right? Think about that?
Speaker 2 (12:20):
That must have been a real philosophical divirus. Yes, all
the evils of man arise from Satan and all of that,
but the animal kingdom and the natural world is not
subject to that.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, some of these people didn't have a literal belief
in the Bible anymore, but there was a belief in
like a great chain of being. There was still a
concept that that right, that that nature is all encompassing
and knows what it's doing.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, like the Watchmaker God, Jefferson's very into that the
deism there is a thing that or the deistic aspect,
there is a thing that happened that created everything, and
now it's just sort of like how Lord Michaels doesn't
often appear on camera on Saturday Night Live like he
made the thing. He definitely made it, or they definitely
(13:09):
made it, but now is not a super active participant.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
So the belief at the time was that, you know,
anything that they were finding remains of must still be
running around somewhere in some yet unexplored corner of the world.
And again racistly, they were like, oh, the North American
West is totally unexplored. No people have ever been.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
There because we haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yeah, spoiler alert, Lewis and Clark did not find any
living mamoths.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Boo Ben.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Remember that was is it? It called manifest Destiny that
Comico series. I never really dug into it past the
first couple issues. But isn't that sort of like a
world where Lewis and Clark discover like weird stuff at
it's a great I thought you'd like it. They reminded
me of like what we what they were hoping to
find in some way.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, it's a great read. I think I've got the
trades if if you want to, if you want to
check about. But that's a great call out there, nol.
And indeed, the real story of the Lewis and Clark
expedition is full of larger than life stuff. They didn't
find any living mammoths, but they they got they found
(14:24):
a lot of other stuff, and they got into a
lot of well check out our earlier episodes while this
is taking place. We got we got to go back
to France. As you said, the noble Buffore has passed
away by this.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Point, he has, he was gone by the turn of
the eighteen hundreds. But there were other naturalists, and even
at this point an anatomist, this French anatomist by the
name of George Cuvier. He had been pouring over these
different samples of extant elephants and elephant like fossils that
(15:03):
had been collected in Paris, and in eighteen oh six
he published the study that was remarkable in a number
of ways. First, he determined that the incognitum was in
fact a separate species from the mammoths. He was like different,
different dudes, we can put that one to rest. And
(15:23):
he named it. He named the incognitum mastadante.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
This is my favorite part, by the way.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Yeah yeah, So the reason that it's called mastadante, you know,
I had always looked at that word mastadon and assumed
that it was like masked is in like masticate and
don is in tooth. But it turns out it's masked
as in breast because because this heck in French dude
(15:54):
looked at those aforementioned knobby cusps on these big old
molars and thought they reminded him of boobs.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Ah the French.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
I want to read whatever love poetry, he wrote to
his paravores. Ah, my dear your teeth the breastwit no, no.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
No, wait, giant nuggets of cream.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
I got Ben before you got on the call.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
It was me, Nolan and Lauren, and somehow we got
into the note of James Joyce Love Letters and I
read next.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
You are reading, Ben. Lauren had not heard it. It
was disturbing.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
It was like you happened to pick a passage. He
just went on, Dude, it went on.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
It was like I read a sentence and the sentence
was short. I'm like, okay, I'll read one more sentence.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
The next sentence was like seven lines lost.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
No, it's just very yeah, very style. Yeah, but also
really about farts.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
So, guys, speaking of pros. When I first heard Master Dante,
I just immediately it's maybe it's also what's going on.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
I went to Masta Dante's Inferno. I thought maybe there
was some connection to that.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
It'd be sick to do a version of Dante's Inferno
where all where it was just all animals. How has
that not been done? I'm sure somebody it's like, well
it's Zotopia fiant.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah. Yeah, and so okay, Cufier here is our Despite
his parent predilections for names, he is again a credible
scientist in his field. And this is where we pay
off on our note about extinction, because isn't he the
(17:29):
guy who said there's probably no more of these Yeah?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:34):
He uh, Using all of this this research that he
had done into these bones and these fossils, he presented
this at the time truly shocking hypothesis that both mammos
and mastodons were extinct, that they were too different from
living elephants to be the same creatures as living elephants,
(17:55):
and furthermore, that there was no evidence that they were
still roaming the earth.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
And he doesn't stop there, right, he goes. He says, further,
extinction is not just some elephantine phenomena, right.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
No, No, He laid out this concept that throughout history
there had been like periodic catastrophic die offs, after which
he thought that new species had supernaturally arisen and that
the cycle continues.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
So you're almost there.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
But right there, guys, guys, I'm just sorry, really quickly.
How come credible means to be believed and incredible means awesome.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Incredible means Now, in American English we use it to
say something is so good as to be nigh unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Seems like incredible would mean not credible.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
What I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a weird language, man,
because then you got canny and uncanny, and then you
have oh gosh, there's uh oh, I have a list
of these all right, different show different, But yes, you're right.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Let's let's circle back about that etymology show that we've
been meaning to get around.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
How many how many decades has that been the on
the docket.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
I don't like to think about that one.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Old we're just seasoned to be fair.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
I don't know what time is anymore so here who does?
But yeah, so so he did not have a concept
of evolution yet, Like we wouldn't get into that until
another half century later with Charles Darwin's work. Also, Coovier
was again really racist, like he believed in like like
like structural racism in terms of like body types and
(19:38):
stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
But forehead and walk.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
But but this thing was basically when the like wide
European scientific community started taking the idea of extinction seriously.
And it's all thanks to elephants and mammoths and mastodonts.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
This is peak ridiculous history. This is a story that
I think none of the three of us knew in full.
And we have just some follow up facts we have
to add in here on behalf of all our ridiculous
historians who are thinking back to about an hour ago
(20:28):
when a huge tooth rolled down a hill and a
farmer found.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
It, a six pound moler, right right, So on their.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Behalf we have to ask you, where's the tooth? What
happened to the tooth?
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Well, it wound up in the hands of New York's
governor at the time, one Lord Cornberry, who sent.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
It back Lord Cornbury.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
Yeah, I know, right who? And he was only styled
as such for I think about seven years. I could
be I could be wrong. This This was an interesting
dude in his own right. His enemies wrote about him
cross dressing all the time. No one is sure whether
that's true or not. But anyway, he sent it back
(21:14):
to London labeled a giant's tooth.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
He might have just meant a giantth No, no, he
meant he met the tooth of a giant.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Okay from the Bible the benefit of the doubt. Yes, yes,
we we also had a couple of other threads. Probably
the one that's going to interest a lot of us
is we know Cotton Mather saw himself as a pious
witch hunter. But Lauren, could you tell us a little
(21:45):
bit more about that less well known fact about his uh,
his work against smallpox? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Yeah, okay. So Mather was able to offer a form
of inoculation to Bostonia during this seventeen twenty smallpox epidemic
because a man he enslaved explained to him how inoculation works.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Well, he stole the idea from an enslaved man charged wow, yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Yeah, we don't even know the dude's given name. Mather
called him Anisimus. And this guy's society back in Africa
had developed variolation, which is a form of inoculation. It's
the deliberate infection of a patient with a disease in
order to treat a bit immunity from it, right right,
And he even said, like, you can tell who's had
(22:35):
it because of the little scar on their arm.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
You know what's interesting that I had never that, I
had no idea that that was something discovered in that fashion,
But it does make sense in the same way you
take a little bit of snake venom to get immune
to snake venom.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, make the antidote, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
And so lots of Bostonians at the time thought this
was real silly, But two hundred and forty two people
wound up volunteering for this inoculation crusade, and only two
percent of those people died during that small pox outbreak,
compared to fourteen percent of the general population.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
So pretty good, pretty good. These sound brutal, but folks,
you got to realize those are great numbers. Oh sure,
I sounded a little great numbers. It's a great.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Especially without doing Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
No, exactly right, it's crazy.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
So just to be clear, they would inject blood or
oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
They just take like a little scraping like like a
little bit of blood or like a little bit of
like tissue sample or something and just kind of like
poke it into your arc. Yes, just grinded in there.
And he Smith's wound up buying his freedom around seventeen sixteen,
so before all of this really went down, and we
know so much about him, relatively because Mather was obsessed
(23:58):
with converting him to christian and wrote about him a lot.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Okay, okay, So he has a diary on how after
he took this guy's idea he I guess maybe he
saw it as trading ideas and he said, here, I'll
give you Christianity in return. But you guys think in
this Mather dude not a good guy. He's not my favorite.
He's no Increase Math.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
The more I learn about him, the less I like,
which is true.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
He's related to a guide him Increase Mather talking about
an ambitious name. It's it's no anesmis, but it is
I think awesome that this guy found emancipation, even though
it's an incredibly crappy way. Yeah, it is a happy ending,
and we have to We've been talking about something Lauren
(24:47):
that is right up your alley if you haven't seen
it yet, Life Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. No,
the new Larry David History a historical reenactment.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
It's like he's does like an alternate history version of
the you know, creation of the Constitution, and he has
all these grievances and you know, the Declaration of Independence,
and his character who supposedly wrote the first draft, wants
to include things like it's illegal to stroke one's beard
and to share an umbrella and.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
And Larry Davis.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, it's kind of bad, but also kind of it's
good bad, you.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Larry David's gig is a little bit a little.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's it's it's sketch comedy, so
it's inherently going to be it's sketch. There we go.
That's a perfect way to say it. So, as we've
mentioned in the past, one thing that we always want
to do is connect these tales to the present day
when possible for everybody who is wondering what happened to
(25:50):
the tooth. We also have some good news about what
happened to the mastodont.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah, that first the peel Master John, that first one
that was put together, is now housed at a museum
in Germany. And I'm willing to try bad French. I
feel with the last name Fogelbaum, I should not try
bad German. But you can. You can like search like
peel mastered on Museum Germany. It'll come up.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Are you talking about the one of the hesi kish
landa museum Domstadt.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
That's the one.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Thank you, you know, I was once a small German boy.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Yes, Oh you're still a small German boy, thanks so much. Yeah,
And there are some of the other fossils that have
been taken from Big Bone Lick have wound up all
over the world, but also at a museum on site
because Big Bone Lick is now incorporated into a state
park in Kentucky.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
So yeah, you get Big Bone Lick sound like it
would be like a Pearl Jam offshoot band, you know,
or some kind of.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Feels like an ac DC song.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
That's also true where I think I'm thinking of Mother
Love Bone which was a a Pearl Jama Jason Bamba
Big Bone Lick feels like it qualifies, but it is
a little more metal coded.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Sorry, Laura, I didn't mean to cut you.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no no. Now I'm
picturing like something where everyone's wearing like cavemen costumes. I
think it's I think it's going to be a good video.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
It's going to be at least a good video. I've
thought it a.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Bad song, but a good video.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
There we go, and we also knew. We also know
there is a reason we were given Tommy Big Something
Jefferson a lot of guff about his passion project because
we're doing this for fun in twenty twenty six, but
it appears a lot of other people in his lifetime
(27:40):
we're kind of giving him some grief about it as well.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Yeah, yeah, so you know, like I don't know, it's
hard for me to say, right because I'm I'm a
nerd too. Me and Big Something have that in common.
But you know, like, but I love a natural history museum.
I love going and looking at the big old fossils
or models or whatever it is that they are at
the time. You know, like it was like forty years.
(28:08):
It was like the eighteen forties before dinosaurs were recognized
for what they are and started to catch the world's imagination.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
So fascination was seen as a little kooky.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Well yeah, so people were like, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1 (28:22):
The whom?
Speaker 3 (28:24):
And like during the presidential race of eighteen hundred, his
political opponents mocked his love of fossils so much they
were like, what, what why.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
I'll show you one day. Proud, well, believe me, proud
people of this new nation. We stand together in the
belief that Tobby Jefferson is just a weird nerd folks,
just a weird little fossil boy. He's like Gollumn with fossils,
(28:57):
which will make sense later when a guy named Tolkien
and writes some books.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah no, no one really understood it at the time.
It was very niche.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
It was also brutal, like we hear so often, especially
in recent decades, about the lack of civility in the
political sphere and how people are becoming mud slingers and
so on. But folks, you have you may have no
idea how much crazier it was back in the day.
(29:27):
Right we talked about the accusations of a governor being
being said to dress in women's clothing. But every time
there was a presidential race in the eighteen hundreds, it
got dirty so quickly people were.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Something like nothing like the way it is today, everyone's
so cordial, courteous.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Well, I mean, at least you know, like like now
it's just clips on the tiktoks or whatever it is,
like like at the time, this was you know, like
a several page essay that would be just a complete takedown.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Awesome in the union. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And through the
magic of editing, we went off the air for a
second to read parts of these this political takedown, this
takedown piece. It is long, it is very in depth.
It is worth your time checking out. And Lauren, we
(30:24):
can't thank you enough for joining us and sharing this
story with us in a two part series. Dude, where
can people go to learn more about your work?
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Oh goodness. So the show that I currently have running
is called brain Stuff. That's one word. It can be
found wherever you get your podcasts. Again. Yeah, it's just
a little short form science and history.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Show and multiple installments a week, right, yes, yes, an
insane catalog.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Oh my goodness, Yeah, I think that we hit two
thousand new episode like like original episodes recently. I'm not
sure though, that could be a made up number. It's
been running for a long time.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
All numbers for me, that's accurate.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Yeah, no, I've been doing it about as long as
y'all have been doing Ridiculous History. There were other hosts
before that, but I'm better but no, no, no, no,
no no no, much much respect to uh, to Christian
Seger and also Marcial Brain. But yeah, that's that's the
one that I'm working on right now. If you want
(31:28):
to listen to me, do that Schweaty Ball's voice. American
Shadows is a great show I was doing with Aaron
Menke's team that gets into dark little corners of American history.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Like which trials types stot.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yeah yeah. And other than that, I
don't know. Find me on the internets, my hand my
my handle on Blue Sky and Instagram is vogel Bomb
b O m B v.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
O g E l B O m B A lot
that one down had the luck and UH and folks,
please stay tuned for future episodes of Ridiculous History, where
we will have Lauren Vogelbaum returning.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Hopefully we won't have to wait nine years. We'll give
you five.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
We'll talk about it.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
It's all scheduling. Big, big thanks to our super producer,
mister Max Williams. Big thanks to A. J. Bahamas Jacobs,
doctor Rachel Big, Spinach Lance and who else whose.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Well jeez Ben Christopher Osciotis and he's Jeff Coats here
in Spira. Jonathan Strickland, Lauren's former co host on Tech Stuff,
which has evolved, and we'll think oswall Oshan. Why don't
want the current host of tech Stuff? It's another show
you did for a long time. Sorry to let the
cant of the bag?
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Where does that come from? Anyway? How how often were
people putting cats and bags? Sorry for a different day.
They think they would like drown kittens in the.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
We've got to keep going, big, big thanks to the
rude dudes of ridiculous crime. If you dig us, you
love them, of course, one more time, just for safety's sake,
superproducer mister Max Williams. And big thanks to everybody who
found a weird bone and said I should look into
this and I should maybe put it into my pinow.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
We'll see you next time, folks, for more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. That's our super producer, mister Max Williams,
Noel Brown, Ben Bollen. This is part two of a
crazy exploration of Thomas Jefferson, who gets a nickname in
this series, and Mastertons and.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
A real history mystery.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, big, big teeth. We couldn't do it without our
special guest, returning guest friend of the show, dear friend
of ours, Lauren Vogel bam.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Oh, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Jeez, guys, can we just jump into the show already
in progress?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Buffone knows that that Tommy is beefing with him about
this whole thing a little bit, and he invites him
over to dinner in Paris because both of them are
hanging out in Paris at the time, and everyone thinks
that this is going to be you know, I don't know,
like like maybe maybe they're going to make peace, maybe
they're going to fight it out once and for all.
Neither of those things happen, partially because over dinner, someone
(01:34):
mentions the existence of Moose and Buffoone confidently says that
no such thing could possibly exist, that it has to
be a tall tale of like a reindeer or something,
and Jefferson later recalled he wrote down that he said this.
(01:55):
He was like, the reindeer could walk under the belly
of our.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Moose, turning into such a dick swinging context, a real
peepee contest, it really is.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
He's like, as men say, he's like.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I'm a I'm a big deal. And you know what,
to be honest, folks, for anybody who has not seeing
a moose in person, no matter how many photos you
look at, they are bigger than you think.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
They are beefy legs, yeah exactly. I mean they are
long legs, like almost camel esque length legs, and you could, like,
you know, totally maybe drive a very small clown car
underneath them.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Oh yeah probably.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Not, probably not a reindeer.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But yeah, maybe it's like a baby reindeer.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
But sure.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
But they're they're they're gangly, they're huge. They actually even
now ruin Halloween throughout parts of Alaska because they love
eating jack lanterns and no one can stop them. That
is true, you know.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Good for them, Halloween power, big Halloween. So Jefferson is like, no, no, no, no, no, no,
we can prove, we can prove a moose to you.
He gets on the line with with another buddy, the
governor of New Hampshire. He's like, hey, I know you
guys got moose. Send send me a moose. I need
(03:14):
a moose now, stat It was like a dead one. Well,
I mean, you can't send someone a live moose. That's insane.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
You could, you know, you could pack it up in
some sort of caravan. Perhaps did he put it in
the guy's bed like Godfather style? Like what are we talking?
It seems a little threaten'd towards.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
It's I think he was really trying to He was
being as polite about sending a dude a dead moose.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
He got ahead of us, I did.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
He certainly did not. Yeah, because he sent this. He
sent the pone a moose to his house in Paris.
It was an ex moose. It was. This was not
living moose. It was so much worse for the travel,
like most of the fur had rubbed off. It was
wearing a different set of antlers because the original antlers
had gotten lost along the way.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Like what like this is Buffalo bill type stuff, man,
this is gnarly smell grat I'm.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Sure it did not, because it was not stuffed before
it got sent overseas. This was a moose corpse. This
was the corpse of a moose, and it had right
like like like you know, like in The Grinch. It
had like a little different antlers stapled to his head.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah, like they actually sent three different pairs, so like
Jefferson could just mix and match however he wanted.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Oh wow, Well, his thinking was probably that if he
taxidermied it, that that bouffant would claim shenanigans.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
That's not that's not bad, sort of like the Beast
of Gadon in Brotherhood of the Wolf.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
But okay, so we also we know this had to
happen the governor of New Hampshire. Here's this bizarrely specific request.
It probably reaches out to Tommy's buddies and they're like, look, man,
it'll just be easier if you say yes.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
This is also the kind of thing you could probably
only do if you you were a guy like Thomas Jeffers.
Don't know that they would allow you to send a
moose through the post otherwise. Yeah, again, not clear exactly,
I'm sure he didn't use the post, but you get them,
you get the meaning, you get.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
My yeah yeah, fun aside. Uh, it's not clear whether
Buffone ever actually personally received this moose.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
It went to a poor assistant, to some sort of
some underling who opened that one before.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Was like getting on in his ears. He wasn't really
doing I think he was out of Paris at the
time when the thing arrived. Jefferson did apologize for the
state of the moose and his like note when he
when he left it with this poor assistant, and insisted
later that Buffon had received it and was very impressed
and was going to issue a correction but just happened
(05:46):
to die before he got around to it.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
There we go, There we go. Unfortunate Lord, how accurate
do we think Tommy's claim is here?
Speaker 3 (05:57):
One on one to ten? That's uh no, okay, that's
living with the under fence.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Okay, there we go. Okay, So at best we could
say that maybe Thomas Jefferson believed that to be the case.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah, snope, says probably not unlikely.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah yeah, underpants, underfants, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah, all right, but okay, so yeah, so moose aside aside, Uh,
Thomas Jefferson did wind up winning this one. There was
all of his evidence, partially about weasel taints, that got
published in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia in
(06:43):
seventeen eighty five. So with mounting evidence against Pafollone's theory,
it fell apart, like the corpse of a moose arriving
in Paris a year after its untimely and a continent away.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Loves to it's very well done.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yeah, that's my sweaty ball's voice. That's a shadows.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
So this sounds like it might be the end of
the tail. But asute ridiculous historians, you'll realize that we
planted a few scenes, right, We sewed a few threads
here that we have to get to because, as you
find in your research, you're Lauren H. Thomas, Jefferson is
not the only person excited, right, He's not the only
(07:30):
polymath or learned, learned character who gets an obsession with
these bones.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Can I just say it's it's it's It may be
the end of the tail, but it's just the beginning
of the taint.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
There we go, There we go.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
I need a T shirt with that one. Yeah, No,
certainly not, because because the excitement about these fossils was
was still brewing outside of this one extremely specific grudge match. So, okay,
if y'all are unfamiliar with a fellow by the name
(08:04):
of Charles Wilson Peel was Charlie. Yeah, yeah, Chuck yeah.
He was this artist and another polymathia who famously had
painted portraits of like a lot of the figures of
the American Revolution. He later opened one of the first
museums in the United States in Philadelphia, and by early
(08:24):
eighteen oh one his museum was housed in the same
building as the American Philosophical Society, which was then helmed
by Thomas Jefferson. So they were like keen on these
fossil digs, and when they got word of this spectacular
find in the Hudson River Valley in eighteen oh one,
(08:45):
they funded Peel to put together this complex excavation, and
he wound up bringing back two partial master don skeletons,
and him and his team set to work compiling a
single standing model for them. The team, by the way,
included one Moses Williams, an enslaved man who was himself
a talented artist and the first known black museum professional
(09:08):
in the country, but so with their work. By on
Christmas Eve of that year, they opened this display of
a near complete fossil model of what they called at
the time of Mammoth. It was the second ever fossil
skeleton to be assembled in the world, and it was
a spulash. It was really impressive. Like they used basically
(09:31):
like for missing bones, they used bilateral symmetry and best
guesses from extant animals to carve replacements from wood. That's
basically what we still do today. The model was eleven
feet tall.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
It was cool.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
They did still have the tusks turned around the wrong
way because they still thought this thing was a carnivore.
But you know, like no one had ever seen anything
like this before, and people felt a sense of like
nationalistic pride about this huge American beast.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Only in America. Baby.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Question for the class, did they have a trunk?
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Oh no, no, no, no, it was it was just
the it was just the fossil model, So they didn't
they didn't have they fled it out, They didn't build
out any flush on it or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
So can we just do a quick reminder that I
believe it was Bouffa who had made the assertion that
no such creature could ever possibly flourish in the swampy
uh you know, garbage, United States. They really did become
a point of pride. We can make big, big boys too.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
And so, of course, with all of this like mounting excitement,
uh you know, when Jefferson got elected president and made
the Louisiana purchase and sent Lewis and Clark out to
survey this newly acquired land. A couple of years later
in eighteen oh three, he was like, yo, Lewis and Clark,
make sure you're on the lookout for living mammoths.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Because nothing ever dies permanently.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Because they still did not believe in extinction.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
So I'm curious about like where this sort of it
seems like it's almost a philosophical divide, Like surely there
were people suggesting that this was possible, not entirely, no, really.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Okay, like like like even to naturalists who were the
most keyed in to all of this kind of stuff.
Like the basic idea from what I understand about it
is that that was floating around at the time is
that assuming that the Earth is a divine and perfect creation,
if that is true, then no part of it can
(11:31):
ever truly perish.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Okay, So still following from from from scripture, like God
has great ideas, and so if God ever went back
on one of those ideas, like a flood or something,
we would know about it from our book.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Which is fascinating considering that war and famine and you know,
horrific things were happening all over the place, and somehow
that doesn't fly in the world.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
But that's humanity's well fair, humanity is pross realiser.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
One natural problem.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Is there heretical? It is to say that the for instance,
the cow was created and now and the cow was
created by divinity, and therefore the cow is as perfect
as a cow can be, So why would it be
gone from the world? Right? Think about that?
Speaker 2 (12:20):
That must have been a real philosophical divirus. Yes, all
the evils of man arise from Satan and all of that,
but the animal kingdom and the natural world is not
subject to that.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, some of these people didn't have a literal belief
in the Bible anymore, but there was a belief in
like a great chain of being. There was still a
concept that that right, that that nature is all encompassing
and knows what it's doing.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, like the Watchmaker God, Jefferson's very into that the
deism there is a thing that or the deistic aspect,
there is a thing that happened that created everything, and
now it's just sort of like how Lord Michaels doesn't
often appear on camera on Saturday Night Live like he
made the thing. He definitely made it, or they definitely
(13:09):
made it, but now is not a super active participant.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
So the belief at the time was that, you know,
anything that they were finding remains of must still be
running around somewhere in some yet unexplored corner of the world.
And again racistly, they were like, oh, the North American
West is totally unexplored. No people have ever been.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
There because we haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yeah, spoiler alert, Lewis and Clark did not find any
living mamoths.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Boo Ben.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Remember that was is it? It called manifest Destiny that
Comico series. I never really dug into it past the
first couple issues. But isn't that sort of like a
world where Lewis and Clark discover like weird stuff at
it's a great I thought you'd like it. They reminded
me of like what we what they were hoping to
find in some way.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, it's a great read. I think I've got the
trades if if you want to, if you want to
check about. But that's a great call out there, nol.
And indeed, the real story of the Lewis and Clark
expedition is full of larger than life stuff. They didn't
find any living mammoths, but they they got they found
(14:24):
a lot of other stuff, and they got into a
lot of well check out our earlier episodes while this
is taking place. We got we got to go back
to France. As you said, the noble Buffore has passed
away by this.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Point, he has, he was gone by the turn of
the eighteen hundreds. But there were other naturalists, and even
at this point an anatomist, this French anatomist by the
name of George Cuvier. He had been pouring over these
different samples of extant elephants and elephant like fossils that
(15:03):
had been collected in Paris, and in eighteen oh six
he published the study that was remarkable in a number
of ways. First, he determined that the incognitum was in
fact a separate species from the mammoths. He was like different,
different dudes, we can put that one to rest. And
(15:23):
he named it. He named the incognitum mastadante.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
This is my favorite part, by the way.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Yeah yeah, So the reason that it's called mastadante, you know,
I had always looked at that word mastadon and assumed
that it was like masked is in like masticate and
don is in tooth. But it turns out it's masked
as in breast because because this heck in French dude
(15:54):
looked at those aforementioned knobby cusps on these big old
molars and thought they reminded him of boobs.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Ah the French.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
I want to read whatever love poetry, he wrote to
his paravores. Ah, my dear your teeth the breastwit no, no.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
No, wait, giant nuggets of cream.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
I got Ben before you got on the call.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
It was me, Nolan and Lauren, and somehow we got
into the note of James Joyce Love Letters and I
read next.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
You are reading, Ben. Lauren had not heard it. It
was disturbing.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
It was like you happened to pick a passage. He
just went on, Dude, it went on.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
It was like I read a sentence and the sentence
was short. I'm like, okay, I'll read one more sentence.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
The next sentence was like seven lines lost.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
No, it's just very yeah, very style. Yeah, but also
really about farts.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
So, guys, speaking of pros. When I first heard Master Dante,
I just immediately it's maybe it's also what's going on.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
I went to Masta Dante's Inferno. I thought maybe there
was some connection to that.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
It'd be sick to do a version of Dante's Inferno
where all where it was just all animals. How has
that not been done? I'm sure somebody it's like, well
it's Zotopia fiant.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah. Yeah, and so okay, Cufier here is our Despite
his parent predilections for names, he is again a credible
scientist in his field. And this is where we pay
off on our note about extinction, because isn't he the
(17:29):
guy who said there's probably no more of these Yeah?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:34):
He uh, Using all of this this research that he
had done into these bones and these fossils, he presented
this at the time truly shocking hypothesis that both mammos
and mastodons were extinct, that they were too different from
living elephants to be the same creatures as living elephants,
(17:55):
and furthermore, that there was no evidence that they were
still roaming the earth.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
And he doesn't stop there, right, he goes. He says, further,
extinction is not just some elephantine phenomena, right.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
No, No, He laid out this concept that throughout history
there had been like periodic catastrophic die offs, after which
he thought that new species had supernaturally arisen and that
the cycle continues.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
So you're almost there.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
But right there, guys, guys, I'm just sorry, really quickly.
How come credible means to be believed and incredible means awesome.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Incredible means Now, in American English we use it to
say something is so good as to be nigh unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Seems like incredible would mean not credible.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
What I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a weird language, man,
because then you got canny and uncanny, and then you
have oh gosh, there's uh oh, I have a list
of these all right, different show different, But yes, you're right.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Let's let's circle back about that etymology show that we've
been meaning to get around.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
How many how many decades has that been the on
the docket.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
I don't like to think about that one.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Old we're just seasoned to be fair.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
I don't know what time is anymore so here who does?
But yeah, so so he did not have a concept
of evolution yet, Like we wouldn't get into that until
another half century later with Charles Darwin's work. Also, Coovier
was again really racist, like he believed in like like
like structural racism in terms of like body types and
(19:38):
stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
But forehead and walk.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
But but this thing was basically when the like wide
European scientific community started taking the idea of extinction seriously.
And it's all thanks to elephants and mammoths and mastodonts.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
This is peak ridiculous history. This is a story that
I think none of the three of us knew in full.
And we have just some follow up facts we have
to add in here on behalf of all our ridiculous
historians who are thinking back to about an hour ago
(20:28):
when a huge tooth rolled down a hill and a
farmer found.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
It, a six pound moler, right right, So on their.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Behalf we have to ask you, where's the tooth? What
happened to the tooth?
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Well, it wound up in the hands of New York's
governor at the time, one Lord Cornberry, who sent.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
It back Lord Cornbury.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
Yeah, I know, right who? And he was only styled
as such for I think about seven years. I could
be I could be wrong. This This was an interesting
dude in his own right. His enemies wrote about him
cross dressing all the time. No one is sure whether
that's true or not. But anyway, he sent it back
(21:14):
to London labeled a giant's tooth.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
He might have just meant a giantth No, no, he
meant he met the tooth of a giant.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Okay from the Bible the benefit of the doubt. Yes, yes,
we we also had a couple of other threads. Probably
the one that's going to interest a lot of us
is we know Cotton Mather saw himself as a pious
witch hunter. But Lauren, could you tell us a little
(21:45):
bit more about that less well known fact about his uh,
his work against smallpox? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Yeah, okay. So Mather was able to offer a form
of inoculation to Bostonia during this seventeen twenty smallpox epidemic
because a man he enslaved explained to him how inoculation works.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Well, he stole the idea from an enslaved man charged wow, yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Yeah, we don't even know the dude's given name. Mather
called him Anisimus. And this guy's society back in Africa
had developed variolation, which is a form of inoculation. It's
the deliberate infection of a patient with a disease in
order to treat a bit immunity from it, right right,
And he even said, like, you can tell who's had
(22:35):
it because of the little scar on their arm.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
You know what's interesting that I had never that, I
had no idea that that was something discovered in that fashion,
But it does make sense in the same way you
take a little bit of snake venom to get immune
to snake venom.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, make the antidote, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
And so lots of Bostonians at the time thought this
was real silly, But two hundred and forty two people
wound up volunteering for this inoculation crusade, and only two
percent of those people died during that small pox outbreak,
compared to fourteen percent of the general population.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
So pretty good, pretty good. These sound brutal, but folks,
you got to realize those are great numbers. Oh sure,
I sounded a little great numbers. It's a great.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Especially without doing Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
No, exactly right, it's crazy.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
So just to be clear, they would inject blood or
oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
They just take like a little scraping like like a
little bit of blood or like a little bit of
like tissue sample or something and just kind of like
poke it into your arc. Yes, just grinded in there.
And he Smith's wound up buying his freedom around seventeen sixteen,
so before all of this really went down, and we
know so much about him, relatively because Mather was obsessed
(23:58):
with converting him to christian and wrote about him a lot.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Okay, okay, So he has a diary on how after
he took this guy's idea he I guess maybe he
saw it as trading ideas and he said, here, I'll
give you Christianity in return. But you guys think in
this Mather dude not a good guy. He's not my favorite.
He's no Increase Math.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
The more I learn about him, the less I like,
which is true.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
He's related to a guide him Increase Mather talking about
an ambitious name. It's it's no anesmis, but it is
I think awesome that this guy found emancipation, even though
it's an incredibly crappy way. Yeah, it is a happy ending,
and we have to We've been talking about something Lauren
(24:47):
that is right up your alley if you haven't seen
it yet, Life Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. No,
the new Larry David History a historical reenactment.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
It's like he's does like an alternate history version of
the you know, creation of the Constitution, and he has
all these grievances and you know, the Declaration of Independence,
and his character who supposedly wrote the first draft, wants
to include things like it's illegal to stroke one's beard
and to share an umbrella and.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
And Larry Davis.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, it's kind of bad, but also kind of it's
good bad, you.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Larry David's gig is a little bit a little.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's it's it's sketch comedy, so
it's inherently going to be it's sketch. There we go.
That's a perfect way to say it. So, as we've
mentioned in the past, one thing that we always want
to do is connect these tales to the present day
when possible for everybody who is wondering what happened to
(25:50):
the tooth. We also have some good news about what
happened to the mastodont.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah, that first the peel Master John, that first one
that was put together, is now housed at a museum
in Germany. And I'm willing to try bad French. I
feel with the last name Fogelbaum, I should not try
bad German. But you can. You can like search like
peel mastered on Museum Germany. It'll come up.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Are you talking about the one of the hesi kish
landa museum Domstadt.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
That's the one.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Thank you, you know, I was once a small German boy.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Yes, Oh you're still a small German boy, thanks so much. Yeah,
And there are some of the other fossils that have
been taken from Big Bone Lick have wound up all
over the world, but also at a museum on site
because Big Bone Lick is now incorporated into a state
park in Kentucky.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
So yeah, you get Big Bone Lick sound like it
would be like a Pearl Jam offshoot band, you know,
or some kind of.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Feels like an ac DC song.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
That's also true where I think I'm thinking of Mother
Love Bone which was a a Pearl Jama Jason Bamba
Big Bone Lick feels like it qualifies, but it is
a little more metal coded.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Sorry, Laura, I didn't mean to cut you.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no no. Now I'm
picturing like something where everyone's wearing like cavemen costumes. I
think it's I think it's going to be a good video.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
It's going to be at least a good video. I've
thought it a.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Bad song, but a good video.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
There we go, and we also knew. We also know
there is a reason we were given Tommy Big Something
Jefferson a lot of guff about his passion project because
we're doing this for fun in twenty twenty six, but
it appears a lot of other people in his lifetime
(27:40):
we're kind of giving him some grief about it as well.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Yeah, yeah, so you know, like I don't know, it's
hard for me to say, right because I'm I'm a
nerd too. Me and Big Something have that in common.
But you know, like, but I love a natural history museum.
I love going and looking at the big old fossils
or models or whatever it is that they are at
the time. You know, like it was like forty years.
(28:08):
It was like the eighteen forties before dinosaurs were recognized
for what they are and started to catch the world's imagination.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
So fascination was seen as a little kooky.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Well yeah, so people were like, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1 (28:22):
The whom?
Speaker 3 (28:24):
And like during the presidential race of eighteen hundred, his
political opponents mocked his love of fossils so much they
were like, what, what why.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
I'll show you one day. Proud, well, believe me, proud
people of this new nation. We stand together in the
belief that Tobby Jefferson is just a weird nerd folks,
just a weird little fossil boy. He's like Gollumn with fossils,
(28:57):
which will make sense later when a guy named Tolkien
and writes some books.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah no, no one really understood it at the time.
It was very niche.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
It was also brutal, like we hear so often, especially
in recent decades, about the lack of civility in the
political sphere and how people are becoming mud slingers and
so on. But folks, you have you may have no
idea how much crazier it was back in the day.
(29:27):
Right we talked about the accusations of a governor being
being said to dress in women's clothing. But every time
there was a presidential race in the eighteen hundreds, it
got dirty so quickly people were.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Something like nothing like the way it is today, everyone's
so cordial, courteous.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Well, I mean, at least you know, like like now
it's just clips on the tiktoks or whatever it is,
like like at the time, this was you know, like
a several page essay that would be just a complete takedown.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Awesome in the union. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And through the
magic of editing, we went off the air for a
second to read parts of these this political takedown, this
takedown piece. It is long, it is very in depth.
It is worth your time checking out. And Lauren, we
(30:24):
can't thank you enough for joining us and sharing this
story with us in a two part series. Dude, where
can people go to learn more about your work?
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Oh goodness. So the show that I currently have running
is called brain Stuff. That's one word. It can be
found wherever you get your podcasts. Again. Yeah, it's just
a little short form science and history.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Show and multiple installments a week, right, yes, yes, an
insane catalog.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Oh my goodness, Yeah, I think that we hit two
thousand new episode like like original episodes recently. I'm not
sure though, that could be a made up number. It's
been running for a long time.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
All numbers for me, that's accurate.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Yeah, no, I've been doing it about as long as
y'all have been doing Ridiculous History. There were other hosts
before that, but I'm better but no, no, no, no,
no no no, much much respect to uh, to Christian
Seger and also Marcial Brain. But yeah, that's that's the
one that I'm working on right now. If you want
(31:28):
to listen to me, do that Schweaty Ball's voice. American
Shadows is a great show I was doing with Aaron
Menke's team that gets into dark little corners of American history.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Like which trials types stot.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yeah yeah. And other than that, I
don't know. Find me on the internets, my hand my
my handle on Blue Sky and Instagram is vogel Bomb
b O m B v.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
O g E l B O m B A lot
that one down had the luck and UH and folks,
please stay tuned for future episodes of Ridiculous History, where
we will have Lauren Vogelbaum returning.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Hopefully we won't have to wait nine years. We'll give
you five.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
We'll talk about it.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
It's all scheduling. Big, big thanks to our super producer,
mister Max Williams. Big thanks to A. J. Bahamas Jacobs,
doctor Rachel Big, Spinach Lance and who else whose.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Well jeez Ben Christopher Osciotis and he's Jeff Coats here
in Spira. Jonathan Strickland, Lauren's former co host on Tech Stuff,
which has evolved, and we'll think oswall Oshan. Why don't
want the current host of tech Stuff? It's another show
you did for a long time. Sorry to let the
cant of the bag?
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Where does that come from? Anyway? How how often were
people putting cats and bags? Sorry for a different day.
They think they would like drown kittens in the.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
We've got to keep going, big, big thanks to the
rude dudes of ridiculous crime. If you dig us, you
love them, of course, one more time, just for safety's sake,
superproducer mister Max Williams. And big thanks to everybody who
found a weird bone and said I should look into
this and I should maybe put it into my pinow.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
We'll see you next time, folks, for more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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